For you infidel yanks the excrement starts before you even install the game. Due to a cacastrophic intelligence failure the publishers (Enlight) saw fit to print an old rough draft of the manual. To heap insult upon injury the festering cunts won't even send you the correct copy of the manual, you have to download the PDF. This may not seem like such a bad start but if you consider that you need the manual to get started , you can't alt-tab to the desktop to read it and the entire satanic bitch is printed on a black background (I assume you don't want to go through an entire ink-jet cartridge or two.) this is unforgivable. I'm from South Africa so I didn't suffer this. You probably will.

This is pretty much the level of professionalism and quality that you can expect from Egosoft through all your dealings with their little stinker. Out the box they have managed to release a game that is not just annoyingly bugged but literally unplayable for most. The game crashes to desktop randomly and the coders somehow even managed to implement the Direct Input drivers so badly that your joystick probably wouldn't work.

The subsequent patches somehow manage to break more than they fix. In version 1.3 two of the weapons cause frame rates on insane systems (7800's in SLI etc.) to plummet to seemingly negative digits. The addition of millions of asteroids in the systems would be bearable except that the autopilot frequently suffers a crisis of identity and starts believing that it is a pinball. *bing!, bing!, bing! kaboom!*.Add the fact that in an attempt to make the economy more vibrant, entire sectors are wiped out at random causing your last 30 hours of play to beccome redundant after your entire factory chain finds itself with no buyers for your goods within a playable radius. Fuckwits.

In the game the different systems are divided into sectors linked by jump gates. In their infinite wisdom, Egosoft decided to reduce the speed of all the ships to a maggot’s pace, increase the size of the sectors and decrease the range of your scanners. Do you need to find that jump gate to a certain sector? Good luck finding it. Stupid cunt.

They have also changed the way race rank works. Now, what you need to do is increase your rank with each race by trading/ flying rare BBS missions just to buy interesting equipment and ships. To give you an example of just how useless this concept is, I played the game for two solid days in order to raise myself one level in order to qualify to buy a large transport. This is a classic case of adding a superfluous fucking flaming hoop to jump through before I could do something simple.

The storyline makes no sense and resorts to including godbedamned maze missions to progress (Maze missions, not just for RPG's anymore)

Just for this I'll be pirating X4 since it's the closest I can get to a refund.